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Free Webcast: Email Security and Archiving in the Cloud

Interested in outsourcing your email services but are afraid of what affect this might have on  your corporate mandate (can you say “Sar-Box”) to retain copies of email and to do so securely? Well, Google has announced a webinar with a live Q&A session to be held on Tuesday June 9, 2009 at 9am PDT (12 noon EDT/17:00 GMT).

You can learn:

  • How to take advantage of cloud solutions today to better your business and save money!
  • How cloud computing can provide you with an affordable and secure solution for archiving business emails
  • Why email security in the cloud is more effective than the running email in house (in most cases)

And best yet, if you register for this free webcast, even if you can’t make it, you’ll be sent a copy of the recording for later viewing. Or better yet, when you get the link, you can share with those around you; perhaps event that stake holder that has been preventing you from moving forward with moving your business’ email into the cloud!

Register for free email security and archiving webinar.

Making Google Apps Your Default Mail Provider in Vista

I was doing some research lately in order to help a client set up their Google Apps (Gmail) account set up as the default mail client in Vista lately when I found a link on About.com that states:

Unfortunately, you cannot set the Gmail web interface as your default email program in Windows Vista. You can set up Gmail in an email program such as Windows Mail, though, and thus send from your

Setting Google Apps email as your default mail provider for MailTo: linksThis statement couldn?t be further from the truth. If you have the Google Talk application installed on your computer, you?ll have the option to map your logged in account to be default email when you click on mailto: links in your web browsers. Email links work great in IE, Chrome and Firefox; launching Gmail, or if you are logged into Google Talk using a Google Apps account it will launch Gmail for your domain, using the default browser.

The process is to open Google Talk application and go to Settings. In the General section, you?ll see the option to ?Open Gmail when I click on email links?; just select that and you are in business.

Yet another reason why moving your business, and your life over to Google Apps and living in the cloud is a great idea! Let us help you move your life into the cloud.

Google Apps Standard (Free) Now Limits User Accounts

Google announced recently that the Standard version of Google Apps is now limited to a maximum of 50 users. If you were a previous customer with more than 50 accounts on the Standard version, you will be allowed to keep your users in excess of this number but future implementations will be limited.

Frankly, I don?t see this as a deterrent to the use of Apps. Anyone with more than 50 users should be either in a position to pay for the service or, if they were a non-profit organization they can apply for a free version of the Premium edition of Google Apps.

From Google Apps help:

Standard Edition User Accounts

Effective 14 January 2009

For new organizations using Standard Edition:
Standard Edition users get a custom email address, tools for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, a shared calendaring system and access to a flexible intranet system. Organizations using Standard Edition get up to fifty free, ad-supported user accounts. If your organization requires more than fifty user accounts, Google recommends using Premier Edition.

For organizations already using Standard Edition:
If your organization currently uses Standard Edition, you may continue using Standard Edition free of charge with your existing user account allowance free of charge. If you need to add additional user accounts over your current user account allowance, you’ll need to upgrade your entire domain to Premier Edition.

Any thoughts or comments? Please use the comments form below to bring up your points.

Google Apps CAN Secure your Company’s Data

Google announced recently that Google Apps has passed a SAS 70 Type II audit! The audit was performed by an independent public accounting firm to verify the technical processes and controls utilized by Google to ensure that customer information stays safe.

According to Wikipedia:

With the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), SAS 70 took on increased importance. SOX adopted the COSO model of controls, which is the same model that SAS 70 audits have used since inception. SOX heightened the focus placed on understanding the controls over financial reporting and identified a Type II SAS 70 report as the only acceptable method for a third party to assure a service organization's controls.

So, if you?ve been waiting to pull the trigger on converting your company?s Email and/or Groupware over to Google Apps for security reasons, you can now rest easy on this point. This coupled with their announcement that Premier Editions will include 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA) for GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Sites and Google Talk.

If you are looking to get your business converted over to Google Apps, talk to the experts here at Exhibit A as we can help streamline this process for you.

Google Moderator Now Part of Apps!

imageGoogle Moderator is a new (beta like most everything else out of Google) product from the boffins at Google Labs. This is a great tool for collecting questions or ideas and votes on questions from a group of people. True to Google?s credo of ?eating one?s own dog food? (or DogFooding), they are using this to collect ideas and votes from Apps administrators.

You?ll find a link in the left column of the Google Apps Admin Help called Suggest a Feature that will take you to their moderator app. When you sign in, you can suggest new features, view the suggestions of others and vote Yeah or Nay on them.

This is a great way to do brainstorming in your organization and to keep a permanent record of the conversation. Set up a Moderated Series and open it up to your whole company. After a set period of time to collect the best and the brightest ideas in a on online Greenlight session. You can then have the group (or a subset of the group) go back and vote on the ideas to see what gets the most traction.

Other Labs features available are Google Code Reviews and Google Short Links.

If you need assistance in setting up Google Moderator for your Google Apps account, please reach out and contact us for an appointment to set this up.

Comments or thoughts on this new product? Use the comments below to let us know what you think!

GMail moves one step closer to replacing Outlook

One of the things that has kept me from moving from Outlook to using Gmail as my primary email interface (besides being able to aggregate a bunch of different addresses into a single interace) has been the lack of canned responses.

Well, it looks like this is no longer a problem. According to Google engineer Chad Perry in this posting on The Official Gmail Blog, they have finally added this feature!

If you’re sick of typing out the same reply every time someone emails you with a common question, now you can compose your reply once and save the message text with the "Canned responses" button. Later, you can open that same message and send it again and again.

You can even combine this with filters to set up autoresponders.

image

Gmail already lets you create filters based on a combination of keywords, sender, recipients, and more in your incoming messages. Turn on Canned Responses in Labs, and you can set a filter to grab one of your saved responses, create an automated reply, and hit the Send button for you.

The addition of Canned Responses to Filter Actions opens up the door for much greater use of this tool for businesses! If you are using Google Apps and want some help figuring out how to implement this in your business, drop us a line.

As always, your comments are welcome (and encouraged) below!

Google App Videos Galore

Sitting on the fence about moving your business to Google Apps? Or perhaps you've moved to Google Apps recently and not sure how to use all of it's features? Checkout the following video links from the Google Apps Channel on YouTube.com.

Can you tell we are "sold" on Google Apps? We are and you certainly should be too! If you are interested and need some assistance with your Google Apps setup, we can help!

As always, we welcome any comments, please use the comments selection below to give us feedback or to carry on the conversation in the blog. if you have specific questions about Google Apps or Exhibit A services, please use our contact page.

More Goodness from Google!

For those of you using Google Apps and looking for a reason to move up to the Premiere (read paid) version of Google Apps, perhaps this is the excuse you are looking for! Google announced yesterday that Google Video will now be available as a branded and secure video service for hosting training and other videos using a YouTube-like environment. Lest any concern over administration, it will allow administrators to add/edit/delete videos uploaded by their users, to control the tag taxonomy as well as take advantage of Google’s copyright violation filters.

More information in the following links:

I ncase you’ve been living in a hole, Google also released Chrome yesterday. Chrome is their new browser that was written from scratch by Google’s teams to address the most pressing needs that people experience these days: instability when running more complex web-based applications. Of course Google has good reason to want to pursue this, and if you look at it, it comes very close to a little mini-operating system. If you are looking for more information on Chrome, you can find a great deal of introductory information in their Comic Book.

While not necessarily game changers, both of these new releases make Google a more compelling business tool!

New Features Added to Google Apps

For those of you using Google Apps, you might be interested in the following new features:

Not using Google Apps yet? Let us help you take fullest advantage of all this Googley goodness with our Google Apps Setup Service.